At the end of the day, its pretty clear to me that Youtube is going to lose the war on adblocking. Either by hook or by crook those that want to use Adblockers are going to keep doing it no matter what.
And to be clear, I am not trying to equate Adblocking to video piracy. To me, the fact that I choose to go to the bathroom during a commercial of a tv show doesn’t constitute piracy and Adblocks just automate that process for me on Youtube. I would also never click on an ad purposefully, no matter what it is for.
With all that being said, I am a hopeless cause and I don’t think that anything will convince me to buy YouTube premium, but I also used to think that about MP3s.
My real question to anyone reading this is, as the devil’s advocate, what could YouTube do with ads or otherwise that would solve the “service problem” of “YouTube piracy”? And furthermore, is there any situaton where you would do anything other than block all Youtube Ads immdediately and with extreme prejudice?
I’m expecting someone smart at Google to figure out how to encode ads as part of the video file as it is delivered, making it literally undifferentiatable in the data we receive, and then there’s no way around it. They’ll make millions in ads and billions licensing it out.
The sponsorskip extension already has the functionality to get around something like this.
Disadvantage of said system for Google would be the fact that if you do that, people can skip ads much faster and they won’t be able to do any tracking of interaction at all. For advertiser’s point of view, that would be just worse version of TV commercial.
You could do banner ads, shrink the video, randomly add a banner to top/bottom and a 2nd left/right. If you skip the ads, you skip the content too.
And TiVo already has the tech to skip ads in recorded media. I only point this out to show that it is possible to do context based filtering and skip to timestamps. Smart programmers will find a way, and the war continues.
That’s how twitch does it.
It’s been very effective at making me watch less twitch, but it does serve the ads no matter the adblocker now
TTV LOL seems to be working for me, at least when I last watched Twitch a few days ago.
I also use a modded app on Android and s0und on Android TV and neither have ever failed me.
I suspect that an AI could be trained to be able to recognize ads, or at least the most annoying, ads.
Also, a community driven project, like SponsorBlock, where users identify ads to build up a database could be created.
These are just a couple of ideas to defeat embedded ads, and I’m not a genius programmer by any means. This is just another front in a war that has been going on since at least the 90’s and as long as blocking ads is less annoying than watching them, we’re winning.
I’m hopeful that reencoding on the fly or even merging preencoded files into a single stream is too expensive because it needs a lot of compute power and invalidates caches .
This already happens in audio podcasts, it’s annoying as hell